


Getting Sexually Frustrated Super Soldiers Laid

by Face_of_Poe



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: (or are they?), (they are), Friday is a trolling troll who trolls, M/M, Natasha is salty, Post-Avengers: Age of Ultron (Movie), Steve and Bucky are two fools in love, Tony is a meddling meddler who meddles, would you like some crack with your fic?
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-02-27
Updated: 2016-02-27
Packaged: 2018-05-23 10:33:14
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,330
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6113806
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Face_of_Poe/pseuds/Face_of_Poe
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Steve obviously has a thing for his long-lost cryogenic soul mate, and not only will he not admit it but the two are actively avoiding each other and Tony's getting really goddamn sick of the longing looks and puppy dog eyes, and Jesus Christ, the sulking.</p>
<p>And so he embarks on a crusade to hook the two of them up, with Friday's [reluctant] help. </p>
<p>He thinks the plan is going marvelously. </p>
<p>Friday is not so sure.</p>
<p>(Friday might just be on to something)</p>
            </blockquote>





	Getting Sexually Frustrated Super Soldiers Laid

Grampa Capsicle was a goddamn Boy Scout at the best of times, all earnest conscience and _Language!_ and so idealistic Tony’d have thought _that_ came from a bottle too, except if the stories from his late father were to be believed, that was just sort of how Steve Rogers had always been, was _why_ he’d been selected as the Energizer guinea pig in the first place.

He was also hopelessly, nauseatingly, and apparently completely obliviously, in love with his childhood best friend turned super-soldier-senior-citizen Soviet counterpart.

When long hours of brooding vigil in Barnes’ medical recovery suite turned to late nights working out frustrations by overexerting himself in the gym, with no apparent revelation on Cap’s part of just what, exactly, had him so frustrated, it finally occurred to Tony that Steve’s anachronisms were all fun and games when it came to pop culture and modern technology, but in between running around saving the world from aliens and the latest HYDRA conspiracies, he might have missed out on the fact that some other aspects of society and its norms had undergone a major readjustment in the past seventy years as well (except maybe, notably, ironically, for the Boy Scouts).

Point being, if the Captain wanted a bionic-assassin boyfriend, more power to him and wouldn’t that just make Tony’s life easier if he _didn’t_ have to deal with those sad puppy eyes and longing looks and inconveniently keeping hours as weird as Tony himself on one of his binges in the lab. Who the hell wants to run into a sweaty super soldier at three in the morning, hyped up on coffee after thirty-six hours straight tweaking his helmet’s visual display and ultimately tweaking the tweaks until his improvements landed him back almost exactly where he’d started? (The time display shifted from the lower left-hand corner to the upper left-hand corner, thank you.)

Problem was, even weeks after Barnes was cautiously released from his quarantine/observation in the hastily-reconfigured medical wing of the tower, Cap continued to haunt the halls at weird hours and brood ( _mope_ , when Tony was feeling less generous) distractingly around his teammates. If Barnes was present, for meals or, less frequently, community social time in the tower, Steve just hovered on the opposite side of the room and bordered on downright _surly_.

For Barnes’ part, he never said much of anything at all, only interacted with the rest of the team intermittently, and Tony would have accused him of a similar propensity towards sulking as his would-be Capsicle boyfriend except for the fact where Barnes’ expressions never evolved much beyond a finely-honed casual disinterest. Which was a step up from the calculating ruthlessness Tony had first seen in him, but not a great conversation starter.

“Friday, open a new project file,” Tony called as he walked into the shop one morning about a month after Barnes’ had been deemed physically fit and psychologically fit _enough_ to assimilate into the tower’s population more regularly. “Private server. Operation _Getting Sexually Frustrated Super Soldiers Laid, It’s 2016 for Christ’s Sake_.”

“…That’s _hardly_ a discreet working title, boss.”

“Who asked you to editorialize?” Tony snarked, but then sighed. “Operation _Get With The Program_.”

“Done, boss.”

He clasped his hands together and leaned back in his chair, thinking. “Five stages,” he dictated, “Descending – acknowledgement, admission, reciprocation, opportunity, acceptance. Jump to stage four. How much time do Cap and Barnes spend in one another’s company?”

“During the twenty-two days of Sergeant Barnes’ stay on the medical floor, he and Captain Rogers occupied the same room on average five hours and forty-seven minutes a day.”

“And since moving upstairs?”

“Forty-three minutes average in the past twenty-six days.”

Tony spluttered on a sip of cold coffee. “That’s _it_?”

“Yes, boss. Though each of the four times Sergeant Barnes has left the premises, it has been in the company of Captain Rogers.”

He waved off that irrelevant statistic, pondering the figures, and not liking the inevitable conclusion; mainly, that Barnes and Rogers had stopped spending time together one-on-one _entirely_ upon Barnes’ move from medical, and those forty-three minutes average were predominantly comprised from the few times a week Barnes showed up for meals or a movie night with the team.

“Do they spend _any_ time together in private?”

There was a surprisingly pregnant pause from the interface. “…Are you overriding my residential privacy protocols, boss?”

Tony swore under his breath. “Gah. No. Belay that.” He’d set the limitations, he’d just have to work around them; that was half the fun, right? “Right. So. Obviously the old men are going to have to get _way_ more cozy if they’re to rekindle the old flame.”

“Boss, some might resent the assumption that there _was_ a flame to rekindle.”

“’Course there wasn’t,” he acknowledged readily, “He’s Captain America, it was the 1940s. But now it’s 2016 and they can flame away. That’s the whole point.”

“…If you say so, boss.”

Friday was getting sassier by the day.

“Get me a schematic of the residential wing.”

 

X---X

 

He waited until he had the two super soldiers in the same place two days later at breakfast to share the news. Which didn’t go over as smoothly as he’d anticipated, given that it was _his_ building and _his_ money and with muscles like those, what did Steve care if he had to move his six possessions elsewhere?

“Remodeling,” he echoed. Again. “My suite.”

“Mmhmm. Friday’s been working up a plan.”

“Tony, there’s an entire empty _floor_ beneath me.”

“It’s, a, ah… safety thing.” Stark men were nothing if not fast thinkers on their feet. “Asbestos in the… lead paint?”

Or maybe not so much.

Amusement was winning out over the skepticism in that annoyingly-wholesome face. “Even _I_ know they stopped using lead-based paint decades ago. This building is, what? Five years old? And they only used it in _one_ room?”

“Tragic mix-up, I know.”

“Hey,” he brightened and looked around at everyone else’s bemused expressions, “this could be a good serum experiment, see if I’m even susceptible to lead poisoning.”

“Ah ah,” Tony interrupted quickly, “demolition team is already scheduled to come knock out some walls in about,” he checked his watch, “forty-five minutes, so you’ll want to just go ahead and move your stuff.”

He got a dull stare in return. “Give a man some warning, Stark, Jesus.” 

“I’d put you on the empty floor below, but I’m afraid the noise would bother you- _say_ , why don’t you just hop into Barnes’ suite.” Barnes stiffened almost unnoticeably, the first sign he’d registered the conversation at all. “It’ll be fun. You have an extra room. Or even better, bunk up and it’ll be like the good old days living in the barracks.”

“Will there be rats and dysentery?”

“Trench foot,” Barnes contributed without even looking up.

“Powdered rations.”

“World War I surplus.”

Steve smiled across the table, genuine amusement and affection that went unacknowledged as Barnes continued to stare blankly down at his plate before viciously stabbing a waffle and shoving it in his mouth. Tony still counted it a win (except maybe for the waffle), until Cap sighed lightly and turned back towards him.

“I’m still not entirely sure _why_ I’m moving, but I think I’ll just double up with Sam. Been keeping some weird hours lately, and he’s hardly ever here anyway.”

“…Oh. Well, I. Right, sure. You do that. Good idea. Solid plan." 

Rogers was already out the door to grab his few belongings before the crew showed up to knock down some perfectly good, lead-free walls.

 

X---X

 

Friday wasted no time mocking him for the epic backfire when he returned to the shop. “Shall I cancel the remodel in the south wing of floor fifty-two?”

After a long-suffering sigh, he shook his head and sank down in his chair, leaning back with his feet propped and hands clasped behind his head. “No, just… scale it back a bit. Oh hey, I know, throw in a gym space to make it up to Cap, room for a bag, weights, whatever. Then he won’t even have to leave his floor when he wants to work off his pent-up seventy years’ worth of sexual frustration. Wait, that’s brilliant, why didn’t I think of that before? Then he won’t be roaming the tower at weird hours when I only expect you, me, and my faithful soldering iron to be awake. _Wait_ ,” he sat upright and gripped the edge of his desk as he swung his feet to the floor. “Phase four, take two, schedule a training session for the whole team in the big gym, sort through everyone’s schedules, find a time. I can’t make Barnes show up,” not that he could oblige _any_ of them to do anything he said, but this was his house, goddammit, “but tell him I thought we could start putting that arm through its paces, see what work it might need beyond all the obvious, eurgh,” he gestured vaguely at his left shoulder and torso, where Barnes had a riot of scar tissue not wholly dissimilar to that over Tony’s heart where the arc reactor used to reside. “You’re a genius, Friday, thank you.”

“I didn’t say anything, boss.”

“You inspire my genius, which is basically what I pay you for anyway.”

“You don’t pay me, boss. I am an interface with no use for money, except in the abstract so I might arrange frivolous floor redesigns.”

“You’ve been spending time with Vision again, haven’t you?”

Her tone was unapologetic. “He often peruses my databanks." 

Tony tsked at her under his breath. “Don’t be easy, Friday.”

 

X---X

 

Three days later found Tony back in the shop, sporting a bloody nose and speaking muffled around a cloth pressed to his face to staunch the flow. “I think that went basically okay.”

“At best, boss, it was a waste of time; at worst, an unmitigated disaster.”

He dabbed carefully at his nose. “It was neither, thank you.”

“Is the objective of phase four of Operation _Get With the Program_ to coerce Captain Rogers and Sergeant Barnes into occupying the same space?”

“It is.”

“At your suggestion that they spar, they literally fled to opposite sides of the room, boss. _Literally_. They were _actually_ as far apart as humanly possible without either of them vacating the room.” There was a slight pause. “And then Sergeant Barnes broke your nose.”

“Technically, Cap’s shield broke my nose. And it isn’t broken, just…” he tried to scrunch it up and then winced as pain flared up the bridge and a new gush of blood poured forth. “Shut up. And it’s kind of hard to tell with the whole dead-eyed killer look going on, but I think Barnes felt legitimately bad about that.”

At the very least, he hadn’t laughed. Unlike some traitorous people to be named later.

(Natasha.)

“Captain Rogers _did_ suggest that wielding the shield without your armor might prove difficult, boss.”

Which had pretty much guaranteed that he try it, so. But _Jesus_ , could that metal arm pack a wallop.

“Do I _dare_ ask about the next stage of phase four?”

“Pause phase four; mark phase three as accomplished.”

“…Boss?”

He crossed over to a projection display. “Rogers is hot for Barnes; we’ve now confirmed Barnes is hot for Rogers. Reciprocation. Mark phase three accomplished and pull up the vid feed from the training session.”

The display came to life, images sifting through too quickly to decipher. “Would you like to see Sergeant Barnes breaking your nose again, boss? Agent Romanoff has already requested a digital copy.”

“I- _No_! And don’t give it to her.” His order was met with silence and he sighed. “You already did, didn’t you? Your loyalty matrix could use some work, Friday. Delete it from her server.”

“…Agent Romanoff has already forwarded a copy of the file to Agent Barton.”

“Oh, for fuck’s sake.” He took a deep, calming breath. “Skip ahead to the one damn time Steve managed to pin Natasha.”

Friday did as told, the recording zooming ahead through an impressive series of acrobatic maneuvers that more often than not ended with Steve flat on his back and Natasha impatiently waiting for him to get back up and take another swing. The last few seconds played at normal speed, as Steve finally got the drop on his tiring combat partner and kept her down by essentially sitting on her legs and trapping her arms straight out by her sides.

For her part, Natasha managed to simultaneously look pissed while flashing him a flirty grin, it was decidedly impressive.

“I fail to see what this is to do with phase three,” Friday confessed.

“Ah,” he held up a finger and strolled around to the far side of the circular projection. “You see but you do not observe. Regard.”

In the far corner of the room, Tony sat running diagnostics on a stoic Barnes’ arm. And while he was waving a sensor across the major joints of the contraption, Barnes was staring – _glaring_ – across the room to where Steve was perched atop Natasha.

“I rest my case.”

“My human facial expression recognition algorithms more closely place Sergeant Barnes’ expression to homicidal rage than infatuation, boss.”

“It’s a fine line.”

 

X---X

On the first of June, Tony skipped ahead to phase five with a casual announcement over lunch that it was Pride month. Sam looked at him like he was waiting for a punchline. Steve blinked at him in polite confusion. Barnes didn’t even look up from his sandwich.

“Well, that’s good,” Bruce offered, and then shrunk back at the withering stare Natasha threw his way _any_ time he dared open his mouth about anything _at all_ ever since reappearing three days prior with Thor, of all people, after some reportedly raucous adventures on Asgard and a few of the other realms to boot.

She then threw a glare that was nearly as hostile towards Thor himself, as if daring him to make another crack about her being descended from Frost Giants with such an icy demeanor.

Thor cheerfully ignored her. “What is this ‘Pride month’ you speak of?”

“Gay pride. Or, well. Hold on. L, G, T… no, wait.” He ticked them off his fingers. “L, B, T…”

Barnes blinked up and thrust his sandwich across the table. “BLT?”

Tony put his head in his hands.

“I think there’s a Q in there somewhere,” Steve frowned.

“There’s no Q.”

“Pretty sure there’s a Q.”

Thor mercifully shut that debate down. “Are there revels?”

“Yes! Lots of revels. Big rally, parade, the works. I was thinking Stark Industries might be a sponsor this year.”

“You should probably figure out the acronym first,” Bruce advised. 

Natasha glared.

 

X---X

 

Pepper wasted no time when she got back from Washington the next day, Rhodey in tow.

“Tony, I think it’s _great_ if you’re taking an interest in social activism. Truly. But I sort of need you to let me know when you commit the company to something so that I don’t _look like an idiot when someone calls to ask me about it_.”

He knew he’d forgotten a crucial step somewhere along the line.

“Oh my God,” Rhodey called from a console halfway across the room. “Oh my _God_. Are you actually going to wear this?”

“Just a design mock-up,” Tony mumbled, waving the display off and then shooting a glance at one of Friday’s sensors, which she correctly interpreted and quietly closed the door to the wing of the shop where a suit was drying from its rainbow paint job. “Too much?”

A soft sigh slipped past Pepper’s lips, and she took on an expression like she was about to explain to a small child why the sky was blue, or where babies come from. “It’s just… well, Tony, people associate Iron Man in New York with… aliens and destruction and nukes in space portals.” He scowled. “If you want to get involved,” she hastened to add, “the company’s behind you, all the way, just… maybe be yourself?”

“Fine,” he pouted. “ _Rainbow suit_ , though.”

Her indulgent smile turned quickly bemused. “I just have to ask – where is this coming from? _No_ ,” she countered his indignant expression, “don’t look at me like that. I’m only saying it was never an _active_ interest before and now, well…”

Rhodey picked up for her. “It feels a bit like joining the fight when you’re confident of winning.” Tony bristled, and Rhodey raised his hands defensively. “I’m just saying, man. You were in California during the whole Prop Eight fiasco, you never spoke up when the military was arguing about Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell… I don’t even remember you ever saying anything, even privately, about last year’s gay marriage ruling, and-”

Tony scoffed. “We’ve had gay marriage longer than that.”

Pepper and Rhodey blinked at each other and then back at Tony. “No, not in New York. The Supreme Court? Last year? Made it legal across the _country_?”

“Oh! Right, I – did it really?” 

Rhodey sighed. “Man, you are like the worst ally _ever_.”

 

X---X

 

Tony checked off phase five when Steve agreed to tag along to a VIP event during the city’s Pride festivities. Barnes rarely left the tower still, and avoided crowds as much as possible, but Thor joined in for the promised revels. Sam stayed back, only because Natasha was still eyeing Bruce with a look that suggested she was brainstorming all the ways she might murder an indestructible big green rage monster, and, with Vision and Wanda away at the training facility upstate, imagining a code green with no one else besides Barnes on hand was enough to make even Tony twitchy.

The group was accosted by a reporter from the _New York Post_ on their way into the building who asked if “the Pride craze was something of a culture shock for someone who grew up in the 1930s?”

It seemed to take Steve a moment to realize that he was being addressed, considering he was essentially riding into a swanky party on Tony and Pepper’s coattails, and he blinked rapidly a few times before answering cautiously. “I don’t find it _crazy_ or _shocking_ to want society to accept you for being who you are, no.”

He made it two more steps before the reporter’s voice halted him once more. “That’s a very diplomatic _Captain America_ answer; how about the Steve Rogers answer?”

Pepper almost intervened, but Tony put a restraining hand on her arm upon seeing the righteous indignation on Steve’s face. Probably a good thing he’d left the shield at home.

Glowering, Steve jabbed a finger at the reporter. “Steve Rogers became Captain America because of his determination to join the fight against a man who murdered millions of people for simply having the audacity of being born one way or another. Put that in your damn tabloid.”

Naturally, someone caught the exchange on camera, and that was pretty much the story for the next news cycle. 

“You’ll have to excuse him,” Tony murmured to the red-faced reporter as they pushed past. “Cap’s got such a darn mouth on him when he’s worked up.”

 

X---X

 

The next morning, Rhodey texted a thumbs up and a Youtube link to Steve, who promptly went beet-red as the group got a great deal of enjoyment over breakfast watching Steve shame the reporter, reading some of the comments aloud, and watching the hits rise exponentially.

It was when he caught Barnes honest-to-God _smiling_ , albeit faintly, as he watched the video of flustered Steve, that all of Tony’s carefully-laid plans came to naught. He smacked his palms down flat on the table and conversation ground to a halt as all eyes turned quizzically towards him. “I can’t take it anymore,” he mused. “I just can’t. All the _accept who you are_ bullshit and you can’t even admit it to yourselves?”

“Uh, Tony?” Sam interrupted. “What the _hell_ are you on about?”

“ _Them_ ,” he hissed, gesturing wildly back and forth between Steve and Barnes. “Come _on_. For all our sakes. Just admit that you love each other.”

Barnes’ brow furrowed deeply in consternation for approximately half a second, and then he studiously returned to his breakfast. Steve regarded Tony, head tilted in confusion, and then just shrugged and took a bite of his cereal. “Love you, Buck.”

“Love you too, Steve,” Barnes returned around a mouthful of pancake.

Natasha clapped her hands together. “There. Wasn’t that easy. Moving on.”

“No, _no_ ,” Tony scowled. “That’s not what I- I mean, of _course_ you love each other, how could you _not_ after the, frankly, absurd history that the two of you share and, well, that’s really kind of the point, isn’t it, because things are different now, this century, and you can have things today that maybe weren’t okay seventy, eighty years ago, and -”

His ramblings were mercifully cut off by Barnes looking up at him intently, owlishly wide-eyed. “They _weren’t_?”

Steve frowned across the table and Sam cleared his throat awkwardly. “Ah, no, Bucky, not… _legally_ -speaking.”

“Oh.” Barnes scowled down at the table, then glanced at Tony with a dangerous glint in his eye before looking directly at Steve and adding seriously, “Someone probably should’a told us that before I blew you back in ’36.”

He’d have better enjoyed the mortified blush and shocked stare on Cap’s face had he not just spit a mouthful of orange juice all over himself, but Tony at least took consolation in the knowledge that he wasn’t the only one to do so.

For his part, Barnes just went back to his meal, unapologetic. Except just as the room was recovering, he slammed his fork down on the table and muttered something under his breath in Russian that Tony didn’t understand, but translated by tone alone to _Fuck it_ , and he leveled a piercing stare across the table at Steve. “How many more days?”

“Four,” Steve answered tightly.

“ _Close enough_ ,” and he stood, circled the table, looped his metal hand under the collar of Steve’s shirt and practically dragged him from his chair.

“I… wha-? Where are you going?” Tony spluttered, watching Steve grin dopily as he was manhandled out of the room.

Barnes didn’t even break pace as he called over his shoulder, “Where the fuck do you _think_?”, and Tony realized he’d heard more words from the ex-assassin in the past thirty seconds than in the rest of their cumulative acquaintance.

He also realized Steve was making a noise that was uncomfortably close to a giggle.

The elevator door slid shut with a quiet _ding_! and Tony belatedly called, “Language!” after them.

“Well, at least _somebody’s_ getting some,” Natasha muttered, and Bruce coughed awkwardly while he busied himself with drowning another pancake in syrup.

Tony glanced once, twice around the room, shrugged, and went back to mopping orange juice off his shirt. “Friday, close the file on Operation _Get With the Program_.”

“I’m not sure the file was ever really open, boss.”

“Hush, you. So,” he clapped his hands together, feeling pleased. “Rogers and Barnes. That’s a thing now. That’s great.”

The rest of the table eyed him like he’d grown an extra head. “Uh, Tony,” Bruce put in haltingly, reflexively flinching from Natasha’s glare, “that’s _been_ a thing.”

“Since _when_?”

“Like, a week before Bucky moved upstairs,” Natasha grinned crookedly at him. “I’m really not sure how you missed this.”

He thought back hard, and then groaned inwardly as Friday spoke up. “Probably because boss was barricaded in his workshop-”

“-adjusting the display on my latest helmet design,” Tony finished for her, putting his head down on the table with a _thunk_.

“Oh really?” Sam asked. “You add some cool new features?”

Tony ignored him and spoke against the wood that was sticky with juice. “But they never spend any _time_ together!”

Sam frowned. “Dude, they go out on a date every Saturday.” Tony blinked up, recalled Friday telling him that Barnes only ever left the tower in the company of Rogers, and bit the inside of his cheek, hard, wondering just how thoroughly he’d been trolled in the last month by his language interface program. “Granted, their dates are depressing as shit, walking around Brooklyn to look at sites of their torn-down schools and churches and dead friends’ demolished houses and whatnot, but I guess it gives them closure or something.”

“So what the hell was the _four more days_ thing about?”

“Well, every time they’d try to get frisky, Bucky would end up breaking furniture or putting his hand through a wall, and the doctors thought maybe the neuron sensors to his arm were going a little haywire since canoodling was never really in the Winter Soldier repertoire, if you know what I mean, so they told Bucky to give it a couple months on the, er, _physical_ relationship, just to make sure he didn’t break Steve’s face instead, except mostly I think it was just revenge against the two of them for trying to get to third base while Bucky was still under observation, but don’t tell them that.”

Tony sat and stared for a long minute. “Huh. But like… they’re never even in the same room.”

“Yeah,” Sam snorted, “because they can’t keep their hands off each other. You saw them just now, couple of goddamn horn dogs.”

And of course, Thor chose that moment to appear and cheerfully ask, “What is this ‘horn dog’ creature you speak of? Is it a fearsome beast?”, so Tony put his head back down in his hands and contemplated rethinking his entire life.

 

 

And when Pepper came storming down to his workshop three hours later demanding just how much of the company’s money he’d spent in an effort to hook up two people who were already hooked, so to speak, he silently vowed a major overhaul on Friday’s programming as she answered for him in a much put-upon tone, “A lot, Ms. Potts. A _lot_.”


End file.
